SELF-DISCIPLINE AND RESPONSIBILITY EPISODE THREE

SELF-DISCIPLINE AND RESPONSIBILITY
EPISODE THREE

Introduction: Your ability and willingness to discipline yourself to accept personal RESPONSIBILITY for your life is essential to happiness, health, success, achievement, and personal leadership. Accepting responsibility is one of the hardest of all disciplines, but without it, no success is possible.
Respinsibility is simply defined as your Response' ability.In other words, your ability to respond to what happens to you. You may not be responsible for all the things that happen to you; but you are responsible for the way you act when they do happen.

FROM CHILDHOOD TO MATURITY CONDITIONING.
When you are growing up, from an early age you become conditioned to see yourself as not responsible for your life. Your parents are in charge when you are a child. They make all your decisions.They decide what food you will eat, what clothes you will wear, what toys you will play with, what home you will live in, what school you will attend, and what activities you will engage in during your free time. Because you are young, innocent, and unknowing, you do what they want you to do.
You have little choice or control.As you grow up, however, you begin to make more and more of your own decisions in each of these areas. BUT BECAUSE OF YOUR EARLY PROGRAMMING, you're conditioned unconsciously to feel that someone else is still responsible for your life, that there is still someone else out there can or should take care of you. Most people grow up believing that if something goes wrong, someone else is responsible. Someone else is to blame. As a result, most people make more excuses for the things in their lives, past and present, that make them unhappy.

Get over the Mistakes your parents made
The criticism, and being beaten out of anger, punishing you emotionally and physically, or withholding punishment from you making you feel guilty. All these negative feelings could then intersect to make you feel like a victim, inferior. And the next thing is to ask who is to blame?.
AN ATTITUDE OF IRRESPONSIBILITY
Courts today are full of people demanding redress and payment for something that went wrong in their lives being backed by ambitious plaintiff lawyers, people go to court demanding compensation. PEOPLE DO NOT WANT TO ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY. People are attempting to escape responsibility for their own behaviours by blaming someone else, making excuses, and then demanding compensation.
Eliminate negative emotions, like envy, jealousy, anger, fear, resentment, which leads to blaming others. You develop the attitude of irresponsibility when you always blame others for such negative emotions.

AN ANTIDOTE TO IRRESPONSIBILITY
1.Learn to say and accept the statement, I am responsible
After saying you are responsible, then look into the situation to find the reasons why you are responsible for what has happened or what is going on. Your car may be damaged in the parking lot while you are at work, you may not be legally at fault for the accident. But you are still responsible for your responses, for how behave as a result of what happened.
2. Never complain.
3. Never explain.
The moment you begin to complain or to explain, then know that you are on the road to refusing to accept complete responsibility for the situation.
4. Do not allow your emotions to control you; control your emotions. You take charge if your emotions by accepting 100% responsibility for yourself and your responses to everything that happens to you. Refuse to make excuses, complain, criticize, or blame other people for anything.
Take action! Work on accepting personal responsibility for your life, taking complete control of your thoughts and feelings. By so doing, you become a much more effective, happy, and positive person in everything you do.

ADDENDUM:
It is the lack of the 'sense of responsibility'  that is killing us as Africans and as Ghanaians. Thus, in every situation, we keep blaming the witches and wizards in our family and hometown. We are not responsible enough for our finances, we are not responsible enough towards our work and acadamics, marriages, family relationships, etc, and when things go wrong we are even more irresponsible towards accepting our failure. We are always quick to point fingers at people that they are responsible for our mistakes, suffering and unhappiness.
Interestingly, some cunning individuals have identified our problem of irresponsibility and decided to make money out of it. They are not helping us to solve it. Never!
These people call themselves pastors, prophets, prophetess, bishops, angels and so on . They always make us understand that the headache we have is a message from our hometown witches; The financial crisis is not a matter of management but the work of the devil; The marriage that is not working is the doing of your wizard grandpa. In fact every problem in our life is caused by someone, and not us. We do not sit down to analyse our lives to see the mistakes we are making ,or the progress we are making in order to take full control of our lives.

Citizens blame government for not doing certain things for them. The Government is to be blamed all the time(which is not true anyway). Government also blames the political party in opposition for not doing A or B. The opposition party also blames the party in power....and that is the climax of the blame game.

 It is very natural and part of humans to play the blame game like did Adam and Eve, the first of the human race as recorded on the pages of the Holy writ.Gen 3:12-13. However, it is not cool to do that. Our maker accepts responsibility.
Take responsibility, and stop giving excuses.